The first manned hot air balloon was mistaken for an eldritch monster by rural French citizens who didn’t understand it and was “beaten to death” by a French mob after it descended to the ground.
I’m skeptical. Can I bother you for a source?
Okay, so it was actually unmanned, and it was a hydrogen balloon, but it does seem to be a pretty widely repeated story from a contemporary newspaper. This was shortly after the first hot air balloon flight and might have had less fanfare, so it seems a bit more reasonable that peasants 21 km away wouldn’t have heard anything about it until the large levitating blob was coming at them.
Wait, I said manned? D’Oh!
Wasn’t he also on death row? He was offered a pardon, if he survived.
Yes, they did that for all those experiments back then.
W H A T
… Whyyyyy?!
Risky click but worth it.
and the movie just came out.
Rasputin having such a massive cock that Boney M had to made a song about it.
But the ladies begged, “Don’t you try to do it, please!”
(He even suggested the construction of a bridge or tunnel between San Francisco and Oakland on the other side of the bay, predicting the existence of the Bay Bridge and Transbay Tube!)
And the city just humored him.
Hey, that dude was in West of Loathing. Now I know he was a real dude.
The US newspaper billionaire William Randolph Hearst owned enough of congress that he started a war with Spain.
“You provide the pictures and I’ll provide the war”
The oldest recorded words from any woman living in (what is today) Scotland are someone telling the empress of Rome, to her face, that they fuck better than her
I had to look that up, it’s just too good to pass.
(Cassius Dio, contemporary historian) tells us that the empress teased her companion (the wife of Argentocoxos, a Caledonian chief) by saying that Caledonian women indulge in a sexual free-for-all, sharing their beds with different men while making no attempt to conceal their adultery. To a respectable aristocratic lady like Julia, such brazen promiscuity would indeed have seemed worthy of comment. We then see the wife of Argentocoxos swiftly responding with what Dio calls ‘a witty remark’ of her own:
“We fulfil the demands of nature in a much better way than do you Roman women; for we consort openly with the best men, whereas you let yourselves be debauched in secret by the vilest.”
A bit further below, however
The consensus view among present-day historians is that he simply invented the speech quoted above.
Sauce - https://senchus.wordpress.com/2019/08/14/julia-and-the-caledonian-women/
TIL Rome once had an empress.
Empress-consort rather than empress-regnant, I’m afraid. She was Julia Domna, wife of emperor Septimus Severus and accompanying him on his attempt to bring the north of Britain under his control
That said, there absolutely were empresses-regnant of the Byzantine empire, and there’s no reason to consider that a separate entity. Irene Sarantapechaena and about four or five others absolutely were ruling Roman empresses
TIL. Did the Greeks get less patriarchal over time? In the classical era they were Taliban-tier and complained they even had to see women.
I’m afraid I am completely unqualified to answer this beyond that Irene’s reign was a very messy one, ending with a rebellion against her. Her own son (the legal heir to the throne for who she was originally just regent) also rebelled against her earlier, and she had his eyes put out. It seems to me like Irene specifically was just absolutely ruthless enough to get past whatever societal rules may have been levelled against her
That checks out for Scotland.
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Harvard University is older than calculus.
Oxford University is older than calculus.
Oxford University is older than Harvard University.
And, probably from the same Reddit thread, there were a pocket of woolly mammoths still doing woolly mammoth things when the pyramids were put up. In the same spirit the Sahara hadn’t fully stopped being habitable (as it was during the late ice age) yet, and that had an impact on Egyptian history.
The Near East really did get rolling pretty quickly once the warm period began, which is funny because there were areas that were arable all along. In a fair world we’d all be speaking some Australian language or something.
I read about it once. I think it was up to medieval times where sahara had lots of green batches and oasis? Though thats in the range of natural climate change.
Btw. most Alpine passes were unpassable from 900 to 1300, we had a mini ice age then.
Nah, green Sahara ended pretty early in the bronze age. The old kingdom Egyptians were really just getting the tail end of it. It was definitely natural, I don’t think that’s in question; the (non-mini) ice age was simply ending, about on schedule. It would have been a much slower change than what’s happening now.
There were a few trees that managed to hang on in one area, though, with the last being “accidentally” run over by the colonial-era French.
In 1938, Orson Welles adapted H.G. Wells’s “The War of the Worlds” for the radio, apparently causing mass hysteria and a major part of the continental United States to believe that a martian invasion had occurred.
“A few policemen trickled in, then a few more. Soon, the room was full of policemen and a massive struggle was going on between the police, page boys, and CBS executives, who were trying to prevent the cops from busting in and stopping the show. It was a show to witness.”[26]
During the sign-off theme, the phone began ringing. Houseman picked it up and the furious caller announced he was mayor of a Midwestern town, where mobs were in the streets. Houseman hung up quickly, “[f]or we were off the air now and the studio door had burst open.”[4]: 404
How many deaths had we heard of? (Implying they knew of thousands.) What did we know of the fatal stampede in a Jersey hall? (Implying it was one of many.) What traffic deaths? (The ditches must be choked with corpses.) The suicides? (Haven’t you heard about the one on Riverside Drive?)
This was a year after he adapted Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar to be set in Nazi Germany.
Wasn’t that just one newspaper reporting it which was more or less just and advert for the play?
No. In fact, I quoted the first-hand accounts of the people in charge of the broadcast.
Yes, there may have been less of a panic than as advertised, but it wasn’t a gross (or intentional) distortion. The drama was also only broadcast once.
The offices of the city of Trenton, New Jersey, a location within the dramatization, had its communications paralyzed for 3 hours due to the calls made to ask the city well.
This is a great thread
End of the bronze age. Have a set of letters between citystate rulers, one writing that help is urgently needed as seaborne invaders have been spotted nearby and his military is off with the hittite empire.
The response back, in modern slang amounts to “lol ur fucked.”
Sounds amazing. Could you provide a link or at least enough names that I can google it?
Its from the book 1176 BC by Eric H Cline.
Appears to be referencing this story:
There was an infamous conman in my country by the name Sülün Osman. He has managed to con people by claiming to sell the Galata Bridge itself. After he was caught, his defense was “As long as there exists idiots that believe I can sell the bridge, I will keep selling this bridge.”
The most interesting thing is that he wasn’t the only one. A guy who called himself Victor Lustig did the same thing with the Eiffel Tower.
He even tried it a second time
One of Sir Issac Newton’s famous phrases is
“If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants”
This sounds very nobal and humbling. However, its meaning totally changes with a few facts. It was written in an open letter to Robert Hooke. Hooke was apparently quite short, and EXTREMELY sensitive about this. Newton was basically dissing Hooke. Nobody will be standing on your shoulders, shortie!
That one of the US presidents died from eating too many cherries.
https://www.grunge.com/630116/how-cherries-are-tied-to-president-zachary-taylors-death/
There’s a lot to choose from, but it’s early so I’ll bring up the three separate historically significant Defenestrations of Prague. Defenestration is the act of tossing someone out of a window.
One started the 48 years war! I remember that from highschool. What were the other two?
I mean once it’s happened twice it must become a cultural thing so the third one is inevitable
True!
